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• 1 2017-04-30T20:41:15-07:00 Artist as Collaborative Text - Towards Liber Viscus 7 Tim Lewis - Final Course Scalar Project plain 2017-05-12T17:14:57-07:00 Collaboration operates as a fundamental element of the handmade book experience. The sharing of ideas and implementation across individuals a remarkable aspect of these texts and suggests that there was a form of literary experience in the creation of these communicative capacities that carries a further affective importance. Namely, that of Love. Take Mirskontsa for example: the text is noteworthy among other handmade books for the heavy presence of initials (mostly from Goncharova) and an artist's credit page. It is extremely notable that Mirskontsa was created in-part by artists-in-love: Goncharova and Larionov would later marry towards the end of their lives.
  
  Further indicative of a spirit of love, Roman Jakobson importantly noted that in the occurrence of the sound-shape in language, there is an almost simultaneous emergence of divergent sexual occasions. It is no surprise, then, that Jakobson's own handmade book is iconic for its representation of a stitched-together heart on the cover. While it is unclear the depth/intent/role that Jakobson had in the production of the cover, what is abundantly evident is that notions of love as meaning-making were essential in the articulation of transrational notions of language. This consideration of the visceral life, the making of poetic accomplices-- all this operates as an extended instantiation of the sound (the word, the letter) and shape (the love life, the dead) of language.  
  
  The artists of the Russian Avant Garde were not simply in collaboration with each other, language/sound, and their hand-made texts. In the creation of their books, they constructed a new way of seeing/hearing a text--- a text with necessarily physical/finite properties (lacunae, failure, decay, and uniqueness). The integration of individuals, texts, and processes represented the next step in the journey towards and through this language of nonknowledge; indeed, the art of El Lissitzky strongly em-bodies and em-braces this analytic. Burst from its seams and stitching new meaning across un-mappable landscapes, the beyond-ness immanent in the Russian Avant Garde handmade book opened the possibility for passage into a new map of reason--where our current temporality intersects and parallels art from the early twentieth century in Russia is still yet to emerge.